Aug 14, 2006

Contributor's Note

Matthew Cheney disliked being born, an event that occurred some distance from Indiana and affected his entire perspective on life. He seldom fit in with any group that would have him as a member, though after his unfortunate experience as a Cub Scout who aspired to be a Brownie, few groups would let him within a hundred feet anyway. On his graduation from kindergarten he was voted "Most Likely to Stubbornly Hold On to Stupid Opinions He Knows are Wrong but Continues to Espouse Because He Has Nothing Better to Do". On his graduation from eighth grade, he was voted "Most Likely to be Pretentious". On his graduation from high school he was voted "Most Pretentious" and on his graduation from college he had no friends and so nobody voted for him for anything, and he was relieved. It was in college that someone innocently asked him his opinion of a book and he replied, "It was perfectly well written and kind of clever, but I don't understand why people get so excited about clever books that are basically just one conceit repeated over and over and over again, because at a certain point it just feels like talking to a really drunk person who keeps repeating the same story, but forgetting the details, and while that's fun for a little while, it does get a bit tedious, and don't you just want to smack them and say, 'Hey, fella, I get it already!' even though, of course, we're all too polite to do that, and some drunks really are kind of amusing, especially if you follow how their stories change and metamorphose and all that, but so often they don't really tell stories, either, they just kind of spout out drunken details and lame jokes and--"

Comments

No, it's mostly deception, however competent in a high-school civics class sort of way; and in effect depends on a sort of bogus platonism, like most bad lit: as if it was a like a Gong Show of the Noesis, yea, and the writer was consigning some innocent talent nite attendee to mutha-f-n Tartarus, if not Malebolge. Crawl into your Ice Bucket, piker!